How I Fixed Claude's Context Window Problem in a 462 File Folder

I've been running Anthropic's Claude Desktop (Cowork mode) across several project folders at my consulting firm. One of them… an enterprise transformation programme… has 462 files. Strategy docs, delivery plans, pricing models, brand guidelines, session notes, old drafts, the lot. Accumulated over months of real work. It was going well until about three weeks in. Claude started stalling mid session. I'd ask it to update a delivery schedule and it would pull context from a pricing model we'd replaced three months earlier. It contradicted analysis it had done two days before. Sessions that used to complete cleanly were taking longer and producing worse output. I couldn't work out what had changed. The files hadn't moved. The folder structure was the same. Then I watched what Claude was actually doing at the start of each session. It was reading everything. Every file. Every draft. Every archived version. Every superseded document. A 462 file folder and Claude was loading the lot before g